The House They Had to Have

Kris and Alisa Wixom’s contemporary home in Bouldin has been a dream, but the process of finding it was anything but

By Jaime Netzer | photography by andrew pogue photography

Published: March 10, 2016

When Kris and Alisa Wixom set out to make the owners of their dream house an offer they couldn’t refuse, the couple spared no detail. It was February 2012, and the Wixoms, who met at the University of Texas as undergraduate advertising majors assigned to the same to advertising lab, first steeled themselves with a bit of liquid courage over lunch with friends at Perla’s. Then they headed toward their Bouldin-area dream home—handwritten, raw-edged-paper-scrolled-up-and-tied-with-twine note in hand—ready to make the drop and keep their fingers crossed.

One tiny detail: The house wasn’t for sale. The Wixoms had initially spotted the house on a blog, fallen it love with its modern design, both inside and out, and wanted to make the house theirs. So they did some investigative reporting, matched a sign in a photo of the house to one at Roadhouse Relics and eventually learned that the owners were building a new home and might be interested in selling.

The Wixoms had planned to just drop off the note and disappear, but as they approached they saw the homeowner in the front lawn, gardening. This being Texas, she invited the couple inside, and five months later a deal was struck.

It is easy to see why the Wixoms are so enamored of the house. The three-bedroom, three-bathroom home boasts 2,400 square feet but not a single long hallway. You enter the house from the side street, along concrete steps. A spacious living room opens up on one side to what would traditionally be the front yard—in this case, screened off by a stucco wall and boasting a private pool.

From the living room, you can either head upstairs, where Sawyer, the couple’s 2-year-old son, has his room and bathroom and where the Wixoms have a second living room. Or you can head to the kitchen, with a small television room off to the side. Kris and Alisa’s bedroom and bathroom are in another corner upstairs, flooded with light thanks to expansive windows.

The design nestles into itself, so it feels full and carefully planned. Each room is defined and compartmentalized, but also in conversation with the greater whole.

“That’s actually my favorite aspect of the house,” Alisa says. “Every room feels unique and special, from the coziness of the television cave to the light-flooded living room with its floor-to-ceiling and clerestory windows. The layout creates an instant intimacy as opposed to a sprawling, open one. We can never decide which room is our favorite.”

The home is a reflection of the couple’s work and hobbies alike. Kris plays drums in a band, The Cold Irons, and a poster of the band hangs in the hallway. Another poster, from an old advertising shoot, adorns the upstairs bathroom.

Though the home fits the couple’s needs, it did feature floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street and looking into the kitchen. That, Alisa says she “never got used to.” Once she got pregnant with Sawyer, the couple longed for a bit more privacy, so they changed the landscaping of the yard and worked with Kevin Alter, Ernesto Cragnolino and Tim Whitehill of Alterstudio Architecture—who designed the house for the previous owners in 2010—to encase the yard and erect a structure that acts as part garage, part practice space for Kris and his band.

The result is almost “like a second living room,” he says. The couple can entertain indoors or outdoors with easy access to the kitchen, as they did on Christmas Day, and Sawyer can roam the place freely.

Alter loves how this addition has changed the space. “Now that the wall is there, the house is sandwiched between two courtyards,” he says. “My work evolves from the conflicting desires of how to resolve openness and the desire for privacy at the same time.” The space does just that, feeling expansive and secluded at once.

“It really is a building that revels in serendipity,” Alter says. “The trees and plants and space play as big a role in the structures—and it’s now been a lovely home for several people.”

The Wixoms’ house hunt was a case of perfect luck and timing, which felt like a reward to them after years of bad housing luck before. After graduating from UT in 2001, the couple left Austin for San Francisco, followed by Minneapolis, followed by New York City. The pair has worked together since college, Alisa as the writer, Kris as the art director.

One apartment in New York was owned by a landlord who kept it under constant construction for tax purposes and tried to boot a fellow resident paying just $700 a month. The couple lost another apartment after just nine months.

But instead of spending the $10,000 it would’ve cost them in fees to find another New York City apartment, they used that money to return to Austin. When asked what brought them back, Alisa says, “It’s that ‘all right, all right, all right’ feeling. We had no plan, no place to live, not even a job lined up when our New York living situation went t--- up. And yet it wasn’t even a question of where we were going. We knew if we could just get back to Austin the rest would work itself out. And it did.”